Jean is a 75 year old who has been isolating since March 2020. She is pictured above with her Mums Mart friends at an International Women’s Day celebration in 2018 so it seems fitting to celebrate her today together with the rest of the Mums Mart group.

Mums Mart is a women’s group that came together when a mum broke down in tears in the school playground one day exhausted from the stress of living on a low income as a single parent with no adult conversation for weeks at a time. Another parent brought her home for a brew and the ideas flowed from there – mums and families began coming together for Saturday evening meals at the local church hall, and then table top sales to raise money to take families away on day trips and weekends.

“Some of the kids had never seen the sea” says Sharon Davis, one of the founding members and Mums Mart Treasurer whose work to support women and families is being celebrated today at an online International Women’s Day celebration for Wythenshawe women and girls organised by Mike Kane MP.

Mums Mart is one of three women-led savings groups from the Community Savers network (together with Brinnington Savers and Sheffield Social Savers) who have been supported since January by the COVID-19 Frontline Women’s Fund managed by the Smallwood Trust who support women to overcome financial adversity and improve their social and emotional well-being.

Grassroots women’s organisations have had a critical role in supporting women and families throughout the pandemic. Elderly women like Jean, who has no family nearby and a number of health challenges requiring frequent visits to hospital, have been in desperate need of support from people whom they know and trust. Mums Mart have supported Jean throughout the period with food and basic necessities, lifts to and from hospital, and regular phone calls to keep her feeling connected and positive about the future.

But what does this have to do with savings? Sharon explains how Mums Mart became the pioneer for savings-based approaches from South Africa and Kenya in 2016 catalysing the Greater Manchester Savers network (soon to relaunch as Community Savers now a group has started up in Sheffield):

 “When we first heard about savings we were an informal group of friends who were getting together every now and then to run a table top sale. We met with leaders from FedUp (Federation of the Urban Poor) and ISN (Informal Settlement Network) from South Africa and their savings approach really made sense to us. So we started up the first savings club as a Friday lunch club. Over time (working first with the University of Manchester and then with CLASS – our support agency) we developed our group so we had a constitution and bank accounts for our different activities, a membership process and a committee, and even our own members' community fund. We visited South Africa and Nairobi to learn how they do things over there. We started doing community exchanges with other groups in neighbourhoods like ours around Greater Manchester and sometimes further afield like Glasgow and Sheffield. That’s how new savings groups have sprouted up.

There have been lots of developments since then. We are raising money locally to co-finance 10% of the cost of renovating a derelict flat into a women’s wellbeing space. Co-financing is something we learned about from savings federations in South Africa and Kenya. It means we have more of a stake in our community facilities and puts us in a leadership role.

The women in our group have grown in confidence and we have grown stronger together, we trust each other and share things with each other more than before. We look out for each other – we help families out when they are struggling and we try and bring women into the group who we hear about and think they might benefit. We started out with about five of us putting a pound away a week but now we have fifty members. People save for expensive times of year helping to avoid using credit cards or expensive loans, but the savings is just the glue. What we are really building is community."

Well done to all the women leaders across the Savers network for your hard work and dedication in your communities throughout the last year!

Happy International Women’s Day 2021!

Explore any urban neighbourhood in Greater Manchester - seek out its craft groups, its over 50s exercise classes, its food banks, parent groups, and meal clubs - and there you will find amazing women.

We call them Women Warriors: the lynchpins of communities that have experienced decades of economic, social and political disadvantage, communities where the Greater Manchester Savers operate.

Women have always played a critical role in community action in the UK (and across the world). Since the onset of austerity policies in 2010 which has reduced spending on public services and social support, women have been at the forefront of the battle to provide a safety net for the most vulnerable in our society. Most of the time they are also struggling with challenging personal circumstances of their own.

The gendered nature of this community action usually goes unrecognised. It is almost always unpaid, and the cost of activities are frequently shouldered by communities themselves.

Women’s integral role in holding communities together against forces that impoverish and fragment them gives them astute insights into local aspirations, challenges, and motivations. Yet, such women are some of the least likely to have influence over the decisions that are made about their community. Places, in the context of Greater Manchester, where they and their families have often lived for generations.

This is a story of women-led change.

The booklet we are launching today takes stock of what Greater Manchester Savers have achieved so far, experiences of our members over time and the partnership support Savers would welcome, and why our approach matters amidst such challenging times.

Our network has emerged following a series of community exchanges between women engaged in poverty action in Greater Manchester and activists from South African and Kenyan affiliates of the international social movement Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI). It was enabled by an action research project funded under the Mistra Urban Futures’ Realising Just Cities programme (University of Sheffield) between 2017-2019. This work also draws on earlier and continuing support from the Global Development Institute (University of Manchester) and its collaboration with SDI, particularly within its teaching programme.

Most importantly, Greater Manchester Savers has been catalysed by the willingness of SDI activists in the Global South to share their histories and experiences; and by longstanding women community leaders in Greater Manchester who have brought their own experiences into this process and made it their own.

GM Savers and COVID 19

As this publication was nearing completion the world was struck by the Coronavirus pandemic. The speed with which under-resourced community groups have organised to ensure basic needs are being met in their neighbourhoods is testament to the critical role they will necessarily play in what is likely to be a turbulent future.

Together with the stark health inequalities between deprived and affluent neighbourhoods revealed by the pandemic in England and Wales, this has strengthened our belief that our work is becoming ever more important amidst mounting and multiple economic, social and environmental crises.

Read about some of our members responses to COVID 19 in Miles Platting, Hulme and Wythenshawe.

Throughout 2020 Savers are focused on adapting to the rapid changes facing their communities. We are currently learning from our sisters in Nairobi who have been busy setting up local COVID 19 monitoring committees.

GM Savers is supported by Community Led Action and Savings Support (CLASS), which provides professional support to affiliated savings groups. We are also grateful for the support of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield and the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester.

In the second of a series of articles looking at the experiences of some of our members during the pandemic, Rowena Harding asks Tina Cribbin about On Top of the World and life under lockdown in Hulme.

Living in a tower block in Hulme has challenges. Gentrification is disrupting the neighbourhood, the University’s students means transient neighbours, development takes away community spaces, and the findings of the Grenfell inquiry compound to make residents feel like sitting ducks in their high-rise homes. So when the coronavirus pandemic meant residents needed to “stay safe, stay home” it was clear that something was needed to keep spirits up.

“There are many ways to die,” said resident Tina who is part of On Top of the World, a community group based in Hulme, who use arts and creativity to reduce isolation and promote wellbeing among older people. “We had to do something before people’s mental health deteriorated.”

And so, Get Busy on Your Balcony was born which saw Tina and her co-workers Anne and Chris dancing and singing “I just called to say I love you” up to the residents of Hopton Court in Hulme much to the amusement of passing bus drivers. People sing along from their balconies and enjoy Balcony Bingo with other activities including boredom packs with jigsaws and sunflower planting. 

On Top of the World are now moving on to organise events like Social Distance Disco which Tina says “give people joy and hope, and nourish the soul.”

It helped that On Top of the World and residents like Tina already had an active presence in the community. “We'd done the groundwork. We’ve had drop ins, Irish storytelling cafes, and dances. Creative writing sessions where we run our savings group and drama, circus skills and a DJ,” Tina described, in life before lockdown. She said that when they started organising the events and pushing bingo cards through people’s doors “they knew we were going to do something daft!” Tina said it’s this kind of presence in the community that’s so important to community engagement - not just during the pandemic. “Success is knowing the community. You have to know what your community needs. You have to have empathy and know the history of isolation and injustice. And the history of the people.”

Tina and the team provide practical help as well as the laughter and singing because the usual challenges of life are still going on in lockdown. “We help with advocacy, food parcels, we make sure people get medicine, if they needed crisis support with money when someone had been broken into. Older people were coming out of hospital with no-one providing care for them”.

The residents have also made a real effort to connect with each other especially people who are not digitally included. “The biggest thing we’ve done is the daily ring round. The conversations have been harrowing. We had a lady whose voice went because she had not spoken to someone for so long. [Another lady] crying down the phone line in isolation and then apologising for crying. [One gent] who had not seen his grandkids for so long and told me ‘it’s worse than the war; at least I could see people.’”

Tina explained that the residents wanted to let everyone know they had not been forgotten. She also describes that they had to work hard to make sure the fear of the virus didn’t undo all the good work the community had been doing. “We all have to use the communal spaces if we go out. There’s one lift. And one hand sanitiser for the 80 of us. There was a lot of panic, anxiety, you could see the fear in people’s faces when you used the lift.”

There’s more to come from the residents of Hulme. Older residents are being helped to get online with Whatsapp and Facebook groups. A new community monitoring initiative is being planned with CLASS and some of the other GM savings networks who are learning from their sisters in Nairobi. Street theatre is planned, along with more dancing on the grass and bingo on the balconies.

And importantly this era won’t be forgotten. A script is being written which captures the stories and issues of living in Hulme during lockdown, and will be performed as a play for residents. It sounds like a play with lessons for everyone who wants to live in a better community long after the pandemic is over.